Kilns at The Banff Centre.

Josée Aubin Ouellette (left) chats with Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik

Artist Josée Aubin Ouellette (left) chats with Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik, a practicum participant, by her installation, "Stage Hand Tropismes," part of the 2013 exhibition, "Skirt the parlour, and shun the zoo," at the Walter Phillips Gallery.

Change a constant as The Banff Centre incubates a new generation of artists

By Steven Ross Smith

Neïl Beloufa is shooting video in a television studio, his lights, microphone and camera focused on two amateur actors posing as a doctor and a commentator discussing an apocalyptic epidemic. Someone has just ripped through the scenery and attacked them.

It might sound like something from a B-movie set, but this is The Banff Centre, and Beloufa, a young French-Algerian multimedia artist, is a rising star on the international scene. His pseudo-documentary will be part of an upcoming exhibition that mixes video, installation, strange projection surfaces and 3-D objects into a fluid collage of ideas that investigate our relationship with representational systems like social media and the Internet. Beloufa describes his project variously as vaudeville fiction, fake Skype, family drama and a rhetorical game that represents (among other things) how “pleasure has now become dangerous.”

“We are at a moment of re-evaluation of culture,” says Beloufa, whose show, Counting on People, opens Nov. 8 at the centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery. “We don’t know what’s a figure, a stereotype or an image anymore, and the Internet is stigmatizing it or crystallizing it as a cultural-exchange tool.”

Re-evaluation. Change. These terms might equally apply to The Banff Centre itself. Indeed, it’s a dramatic time – the centre’s president, Jeff Melanson, has departed less than two years into his expected mandate of five to 10 years, leaving implementation of his bold and disruptive strategic plan an open question. Some initiatives, like a new, aggressive dissemination strategy involving radio and online modes, have come into being. But others, such as opening new facilities in downtown Banff, remain at the conceptual stage.

Change is afoot too in the visual and digital arts department, where a new director, Jen Mizuik, took charge in March. Although Beloufa’s exhibition, a partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, is inherited programming, Mizuik says it fits her vision of encouraging cross-disciplinary practices and commissioning new work. “I’m a facilitator,” says Mizuik, a graduate of the Alberta College of Art and Design, who spent the last five years as general manager of Experimenta Media Arts in Australia. “I’m not here to curate shows for my own ego. I want to take what’s here out into the world and bring what’s out there here.”

The Centre is unique among Canadian arts organizations for the breadth of its activities and its innovative spirit, to say nothing of its stunning setting. Nestled in the forest on a mountainside above town, it hosts some 400 performances, exhibitions and concerts each year.

But some of its most important contributions are more ephemeral – along with commissioning new work, it nurtures creativity through mentoring and residencies, offering artists time, space and access to experts who encourage them to explore and experiment. Melanson, before taking a post as CEO of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, called the centre “the largest arts and creativity incubator on the planet.” With an annual budget of $57.5 million and a staff of almost 500 people, the centre has attracted top talent over the years – people like Brian Jungen, Rebecca Belmore, Oscar Peterson, Joni Mitchell and Alice Munro. They come to perform, to teach, or simply to find a quiet space for their own work.

Change, or more accurately, evolution and growth, has been a constant throughout the centre’s 80-year history. Things started modestly with a drama residency in 1933. Visual arts came two years later. Other departments followed, including audio, film and media, indigenous arts, literary arts, mountain culture, music and theatre, which includes dance and opera. The centre also has leadership and conference divisions.

Recent decades have seen growing emphasis on digital technology, although the centre remains committed to traditional practices such as painting, writing for the page and playing classical music. In visual arts, for instance, studio facilities support an array of practices – from ceramics, printmaking and papermaking to photography, sculpture and new and interactive media.

Incubation occurs not just for invited or commissioned artists like Beloufa, but also in annual thematic, discipline-based or self-directed residencies open to artists at various stages of development. Given the centre’s reputation, competition for spots is stiff, and tuition and accommodation fees, even with annual scholarships of some $3.5 million, can be prohibitive. Still 4,000 artists from around the world visit each year.

Kerri Reid, a multidisciplinary artist based in Sointula, B.C., a coastal village, first attended a residency three years ago. The natural beauty impressed her. “The mountains rub off on you, being in this air at this altitude, and having this view,” she says. “I made new artist friends and have kept in contact with many of them. You can get a lot done here in a short amount of time because of that intense focus on your art without daily-life distractions.”

Reid returned this year as guest faculty in a residency led by Shary Boyle, the Toronto artist who represented Canada at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Reid spent most of her time doing studio visits with the 18 participants – “people doing sound work, making videos, an artist doing a large bronze piece, a man who does very intricate pen-and-ink drawing, a woman sculpting with steel, some doing performance, and there’s an artist making puppets.”

While the individual focus is on creation and feedback, residencies generally include talks and other group activities. It can be intense – and tiring. But Reid remains enthusiastic. “It is inspiring to see all this work going on. It’s a real pleasure and a joy. I feel so lucky to be here.”

Such incubation processes feed the centre’s holistic cycle, engaging artists at different nodes across the artistic spectrum – creation, collaboration, presentation, dissemination and so on. That cycle, in a growing way, is also drawing departments to work more collaboratively.

For instance, one of Mizuik’s silo-breaking roles is to lead a new narratives program in collaboration with literary arts and The Banff Centre Press, which publishes books on contemporary art and culture. Ideas were still coalescing, but it will likely incorporate digital storytelling, a text-based exhibition and critical writing.

Other such projects will connect music with digital arts, and the Walter Phillips Gallery with the Banff Mountain Book and Film Festival, a celebration of mountain culture that features film screenings and readings by authors. Another big cross-disciplinary undertaking is Convergence, a November forum about the intersection of technology and interdisciplinary art.

Beloufa, whose show will open in London before travelling to Banff, praises the facility. “There are becoming fewer places in the world where an artist can produce shows,” he says.

He’s not yet 30, but his work shakes up expectations. He crashes the set to make a point, disrupting the normal sanctity of a television newscast, the arbitrary background in a Skype call, or the appearance of authority. His irreverence startles, in the way that change jars complacency, creating simultaneous excitement and uncertainty. This charged space is the territory that artists work in, at once familiar but uncomfortable. It is this conundrum that creates art. Successful artists learn to live with the buzz and the blues, not letting doubt or fear bring them to a full stop.

It’s also a way of life for the centre’s staff members. The scale of change is invigorating, yet demanding. Nervousness circulates, but the focus remains on supporting artists and their work. Mizuik, when asked if she worries about the challenges of her new role, responds succinctly: “I’m only apprehensive if I’m not moving.”